1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to telecommunications services. More particularly, the present invention relates to capabilities that enhance substantially the value and usefulness of various messaging paradigms including, inter alia, Multimedia Message Service (MMS), Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), etc.
2. Background of the Invention
As the ‘wireless revolution’ continues to march forward the importance to a Mobile Subscriber (MS), for example a user of a Wireless Device (WD) such as a mobile telephone, a BlackBerry, etc. that is serviced by a Wireless Carrier (WC), of their WD grows substantially.
One consequence of such a growing importance is the resulting ubiquitous nature of WDs—i.e., MSs carry them at almost all times, use them for an ever-increasing range of activities, and (not unreasonably) expect them to operate properly under all circumstances.
The realization of the ‘operate properly under all circumstances’ expectation that was noted above is becoming increasingly more difficult. For example:
1) WDs are all different—e.g., the vendors or manufacturers of WDs (such as, for example, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, LG, etc.) supply their WDs with different size screens, support for different color depths, varying degrees of support for audio and video information, etc.
2) The WD differences that were noted above mean, possibly inter alia, that content—e.g., images, video, audio, etc. containing anything and everything from news alerts, traffic updates, stock information, movie clips, TV shows, etc.—that is crafted for one WD may not work (e.g., may not be viewable, etc.) on another WD.
3) With the increasing delivery of content to WDs, and with the charging of not inconsiderable amounts of money for same, an important threshold question arises for a provider of content—e.g., a Content Provider (CP), a Service Provider (SP), etc.—i.e., how can the provider know the unique characteristics of a specific WD so that they can, possibly inter alia, tailor their content to those characteristics so that the MS, when they receive the content on their WD, will enjoy a positive user experience?
Fortunately a standard description of a WD does exist—a User Agent Profile (UAProfile) as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A UAProfile is a small Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that describes the particulars of a WD. A UAProfile may include, possibly inter alia, details for vendor, model, screen size, multimedia capabilities, character set support, etc.
Unfortunately the publicly available UAProfiles (at, for example, sites such as www.uaprofile.com) may contain incorrect information or be unavailable entirely; the retrieval of a UAProfile may be quite time consuming; etc.
Even though a provider of content may have access to a repository of UAProfiles, they face an additional impediment to being able to learn about the particulars of a WD of interest—i.e., if a CP, SP, etc. knows just the Telephone Number (TN) of a WD of interest, how can the CP, SP, etc. determine from the TN the manufacturer, model, etc. of the WD so that they can then (at least try to) retrieve the WD's UAProfile from a repository?
The challenges that were described above highlight the need for an infrastructure that CPs, SPs, etc. may use to quickly retrieve quality-controlled UAProfiles based just on a WD's TN.
The present invention provides such an (enhanced UAProfile access and management) infrastructure and addresses various of the (not insubstantial) challenges that are associated with same.